Chances for Democracy in Europe

It will be explored, how the new wave of illiberalism has impacted Europe in the last decades. While liberal democracy is deeply rooted and stable in the developed Europe, Russia, the new fragile state became hotbed of illiberalism by the 2000’s., but other post-Communist countries have stepped on divergent paths.

---

At the turn of Twenty-First Century, no one could have believed that by a decade later, the prime minister of Hungary would roughly declare his political and government system as an illiberal democracy. Chances for Democracy in Europe: The New Wave of Illiberalism in Post-Communist Countries explores the scenarios of building illiberal democracy as followed by Putin in Russia, then how it spread in the post-Communist Europe. It will be showing how a full-born illiberal democracy has unfolded in Hungary since 2010, during the last four Orbán governments, and the similarities it shares with the Russian illiberal state. If the Treaty of Maastricht, that laid down democratic principles of the European Union, has the sufficient political and legal tools to enforce them, when they are not respected by the member states. While the EU failed in this effort with Hungary, it seems to be successful of a sort in Poland and Slovenia. The author analyses why developed Western European countries with long traditions of democratic traditions and values, have been resistant to illiberalism, and remained strong liberal democracies, but what about the countries without long traditions of democratic values?